The City Dark
The Falcon's Children, Chapter 4
This is the fourth chapter of The Falcon’s Children, a fantasy novel being published serially on this Substack. For an explanation of the project, click here. For the table of contents, click here. For an archive of world building, click here.
The inn was called the Snow Goose and Rowenna had to admit it was a fine place, with not one but three fireplaces, a ceiling higher than the shrine in Balenty, and a smell at all hours that she associated with feastdays back at home — meat and spice and onion, a richness with a smokey afterscent, emanating from the kitchens but hanging over all the long tables in the common room and rising even to their second-story chamber, a tenday’s worth of lodging purchased in advance for three more of her da’s supply of crowns.
The crowns bought him a messenger as well, a redheaded boy dispatched on an errand unknown to Rowenna, bearing a scrip of parchment that was equally mysterious, since her da barely had his letters and wasn’t in the habit of using them. Old friends, old friends, was all he would say when the boy was gone, and when the girl brought them wine from the kitchens he let Rowenna drink almost a tankard’s worth, enough to give her a strange shivering feeling that lasted through their meat pies and the fall of dark outside and the minstrel who came out to sing, to cheers from the crowd, which was as large as her whole village gathered for a feast.
There were heavy-bearded men with strong noses and jaws and furs about their shoulders, young and smooth-faced men with hard leather jerkins and ostentatious swordbelts, fat men in rich colors, weaselish men with hair yellower or redder than she had ever seen before. And the women, while fewer, were even more startling — a handful more beautiful than she had imagined possible, red lips and dark hair and skin whiter than a flawless skein of wool; the others harder, more like men, sometimes in leather themselves, one with a frightening scar, one with daggers crossed below her bosom, one with skin like copper and her head shaved so close the firelight seemed to leap from it, like a reflection off a metal bowl.
The most striking, to Rowenna’s eyes, was an older woman planted in a far corner, diagonally across the room from where they sat. She had been fair once, with eyes whose blue gleamed even at a distance, and white hair that still had a spattering of gold. She was robed in blue, a jewel or more than one winking on her hand, and her face was narrow, jutting, proud.
A man seated with her was talking, gesticulating, a little round man with a fringe of beard, and she sat there like a queen half-listening to a petitioner, confident and indifferent all at once. Behind her loomed one of the men with swordbelts, taller and thicker than most in the room, his face masked in shadows, his presence an implicit threat.
“Must be a lady merchant,” her father said after he caught Rowenna looking that way a few times. “Probably inherited the business from her husband — happens now and then. Soon enough our competition, when my friends make good …”
He was talking expansively, a sign that the wine was working on him. Rowenna sipped from her tankard and felt it work on her, the shivers and the warmth. The music picked up, a few songs she knew, mostly ones she didn’t. The minstrel smiled and winked at them when he came to the bar between songs, and Hilwen flung a giggle back. He looked young and handsome from ten spans away, older and wearier close up. There was fruit and cheese on their table to finish up the meal, strong tastes to go with the strong smells, the strange faces, the room that spun a little bit as the night wore on.
In Rowenna’s memory the next day there was a blurring between the real experience of those hours and the images that followed her into sleep, between the common room as she actually remembered it and the world that still spun through her dreaming mind once her father finally ordered them upstairs, and Hilwen’s complaining gave way, and they went.
Somewhere in that blurring dreamscape she recalled a face more unusual than all the others, moving at the fringes of the crowd, or maybe conjured from the fringes of her mind. A huge man, bigger than any of the bodyguards or swords-for-hire, with the roundest baldest head she had ever seen, a spill of pockmarks down one of his cheeks while the other was entirely smooth, and an aura that kept the crowd at a little distance, eddying and shifting around him as he moved.
A man whose gaze brushed at her, held, and met her eyes with a look more knowing, somehow, than any flirtatious minstrel or lecherous boatman. A look that seemed to say, I know you, little girl, and instead of warmth and shivers left her feeling oh so very cold.
The next morning in the cool spring sunlight the girls walked together to the Castle. Rowenna wanted to see the temple but Hilwen said that she had seen priests and sisters before and she knew all about the archangels but she’d never seen a real lady, nor a real lord, nor certainly a real princess or a prince, and Rowenna said that they wouldn’t likely see anything just hanging around outside the Castle walls, and Hilwen said how little she knew, and they went back and forth until inevitably Rowenna gave way.
The Snow Goose was just off the city’s Great Way, high enough up the hill that its side street had paving stones worked together with its hardened earth. The street lay deep in shadow in the morning, squeezed between the inn’s four stories and a taller apartment building that was open at the ground level for several shops where they lingered, briefly, fingering soft wools and linens under the clothier’s calculating gaze.
Then they went out of the shadows and up the Great Way itself, which was not as crowded as it been upon their arrival yesterday. There were knots of women in drab colors, a few men striding alone in brighter gear, a group of children following a green brother, and every few minutes a party passed on horseback. But there was plenty of space to walk on the wide paved street without feeling crushed or cramped or endangered. There had been beggars in the harbor when they landed but there were few here; Rowenna noticed more men in what must be the livery of the City Watch, and wondered if they were charged with keeping the streets clearer closer to the Castle. There was a cleaner feeling to the area, the scent of refuse growing weaker as they climbed, even the heaps of garbage looking tidier.
Soon a wide street split off leftward, creating a Y where a statue of Uriel stood, the archangel’s feet hidden by offerings, his shoulders dressed with flowers. The statue was uncanny to Rowenna, so perfectly lifelike even with its chips and fractures, as though the the archangel might simply step off the pedestal and bless them. There was one beggar here, an old blind women seated on a low bench beside the statue, with a bowl for coins and a tiny tamed squirrel chittering between her skirts. Rowenna made her sister pause to pray before the statue, though Hilwen rolled her eyes, and then they each left a tinpenny for the beggar, which made Rowenna feel almost like a grand lady even as a small part of her mind wondered how long their coin would last.
A little way longer, the Castle looming now, the colors of passersby growing bolder, their faces now businesslike and proud — important servants, she decided, bearing the arrogance of association with great masters — and then they reached the wide open space before the Castle’s gates. It was a square of flagstones with a statue of a man on horseback rearing in its center, his name and title and great deeds carved in letters that Rowenna slightly recognized but couldn’t hope to read. Up a long stone ramp from the square the gates themselves were open, with legionnaires in bright armor standing watch on either side while people in different liveries passed through, and if you went a little way up the ramp you could peer through the archway and see a fountain, horses, bright clothes — fragments of the nobility’s fairy-tale existence.
But the soldiers at the gate were asking everyone’s business as they passed, and though Hilwen slipped up close to them and flirted while Rowenna, embarrassed, skulked a little lower down, it was all for nothing. The soldiers grinned and laughed, one mocked her accent and another eyed her breasts and a third asked her where she was staying in the city and what she might be up to after dark, but the answer to her importuning was no, no, never, the Castle wasn’t for the likes of her, be off.
They hung about the square for the better part of an hour, watching and hoping to see some great personage, but seeing only servants on errands, a butcher and his boys driving a wagon heavy with meats, a messenger on horseback, a party of city watchmen accompanying a red-faced man in green, a pair of officers with plumes and beards … all interesting enough but not the great lords and (especially) ladies they’d been hoping for. So after a while they set out following the street where it bent eastward and traced the outline of the Castle wall, peering up always at the battlements and towers, hoping to see a prince or princess high above.
Soon they were mostly alone, in high sun and shadow, with only an occasional scurrying servant to disturb the stillness. There were no markets here, no inns or taverns, just high walls — the Castle on their left, with only legionnaires (or at least their helmeted heads) visible upon the battlement, and then lower walls to their right, enclosing great stone houses that must belong to the rich and noble and important, with small doors that didn’t open and barred windows higher up.
Eventually they reached the long reddish wall of what seemed to be a sisterhouse — Rowenna couldn’t read the sign over its gate, but she guessed it was the blue sisters from the small icon of Jophiel set into the stone. And as if in confirmation — because the blue sisters were famous singers — as they neared the end of the street she heard what sounded like a sung orison floating up, like all of Balenty singing on a tenday but clearer and stronger and on key.
It was lovely in those mostly-empty streets and spaces, with sparrows strutting in their path, the sunlight warm and yellow on the stones. But it was also a little boring, and so eventually they turned back to Rendale’s crowded regions, twisting and exploring their way downhill through the narrow alleys between the noble houses, bending westward all the time until they finally hit the Great Way again, and then descending further to the streets around their inn.
The Snow Goose had a kind of raised platform between its open doors and the arched opening into its stables, with benches and cushions where Rowenna imagined it was pleasant to sit outside and sing on summer nights. When they came back from their wanderings there was a man sitting on the platform’s steps, smoking a long thin pipe and watching them as they came along the street. He had a fox’s face, sharp and knowing, with a fall of brown hair and a thin beard, and his cloak and doublet were dark but not quite black, a shifting color woven from a rich-looking cloth, with stripes of fur coming down the shoulders.
“And which riverboat has carried two such beauties into this cold city?” he said, loudly but lightly, as they reached him. “Don’t tell me the lords of the Heart have grown so blind that they let the flower of their fields be carried off to northern lands?”
His accent had a rough music and Rowenna found herself blushing. But Hilwen said boldly:
“Maybe we’ve found the lords of the Heart wanting and come to try our luck with mountain men. Have you see any, sir? Men with a thicker beard than yours, of course, since my sister swears she won’t marry a man unless a bird can nest below his chin.”
“Such sauce from a country girl!” the fox-faced man said, laughing. “With those plain skirts I expected you to ask me if I knew hold to squeeze a teat — a cow’s teat, I mean, of course, forgive me — and then drag me off to chase cattle on your father’s acres. But if you’re a flirt you’ve come to the right quarter, and you should forget the beards and bide a while here. The mountain men are all down in Winter’s Town, or headed up the gold roads even now, and either way you’ll find that they don’t offer much in the way of conversation.”
“Well, a man like you might offer nothing but sweet words,” Hilwen returned, “and at least the mountain’s man gold is something a girl can count on. Anyway, my father warned us not to tarry with sweet talkers when he sent us out this morning.”
He said no such thing, Rowenna almost said, but she knew it would be a foolish thing to say, so she bit her tongue while fox face waved his pipe dismissively and said, “Well then, hurry on inside, back to the great farmer and whatever pig-keeper he has picked out for you to marry. It’s true that a Castle man like me could be trouble for a lady from the country.”
“You’re from the Castle?” Hilwen said, her archness cracking for an instant, and then she tried to recover with a flick of her skirts. “Or more likely just a braggart who like to spin a tall tale to simple girls.”
“I slept inside its walls last night and I’ll sleep there again tonight, unless I find better bedding around here,” the man said. “I’ll even tell you which great lord I serve, but only as a trade for a bit of your own intelligence. Nothing’s free in the city, but then clever girls like you know that already.”
“What kind of … intelligence ?” Rowenna said, feeling that she ought to say something and not just stand there all agape like a child.
“Oh, any sort, really — names for you both, at least, and where you’re from and what really brings you to this fine inn.”
“We can bargain as well as any Rendale girl,” Hilwen told him. “A piece for a piece – I’m Hilwen, my younger sister here’s Rowenna” — she stressed younger in a way that made it sound like baby — “but you’ll get no more unless you tell us where you’re from and who you serve.”
“Easily done,” the man said. “I come from the Castle, and I serve the good lord chamberlain himself, he who stands just a hair’s-breadth from the throne. I shan’t ask you to bow before me, but a fine curtsy wouldn’t go amiss.”
Rowenna was impressed — she had expected a lesser brag. But Hilwen kept her chin up and said pertly: “Any man can claim any master. Why would the lord chamberlain’s man be sitting on the doorstep of this inn?”
“Ah, that’s a fair question, but you haven’t bought the answer yet. I at least can say that I live in this city, to justify my business here, but you have no so such excuse. So before I say more of myself, tell me first why two country lovelies like yourselves are guests at the Snow Goose?”
So they went, back and forth, with the fox-faced man coaxing out a version of their story, edited to sound a bit more romantic — their father was a deeply grieving widower, in Hilwen’s tale, unable to bear the sight of their farmhouse any more, come to Rendale to reclaim the grand career as a merchant that he’d abandoned for love of their mother years before …
As they played and bantered, with Rowenna mostly listening and watching, she slowly realized that there something strange about the back-and-forth, something that she could see but her sister, the more practiced flirt, was missing. The fox-faced man was talking with Hilwen, his every reply pivoting smoothly off whatever he was offered, but he wasn’t actually paying close attention to the older girl — not in any manner of male attention that Rowenna recognized, at least, whether it was the lechery on the boat or the fumbling of the boys in Balenty or even the cold weighing look of the bald man in her maybe-dream.
Instead he was talking to Hilwen but mostly paying attention to her, to Rowenna, his eyes flicking to her every other moment, his gaze seeming to sharpen whenever she said anything at all, however fumbling and stupid-sounding, and — here she couldn’t quite define what she was seeing, but she was still sure that she was seeing it — his whole being seemingly inclining toward her no matter how many quick words he directed toward her sister.
But not in a way that flattered her or that made her feel like he thought her the prettier one. It was a different kind of scrutiny, cooler and more mysterious, uninterested in her body, focused intently on her face and words.
It was a very strange feeling, sensing this kind of scrutiny, like suddenly seeing through the veil at a temple sacrifice. When their wordplay was over, when he had kissed their hands and promised to make an appearance in the common room one night and pay them further court, Rowenna felt a little dazed, and while they sat and ate the midday meal inside she let herself rest quietly in the shadow of her sister’s obvious delight.
Do you think he’ll come tonight? Hilwen kept saying, not a question so much as a litany, and when Rowenna finally ventured that a factor for the mighty lord chamberlain probably had many duties in the evening, and for all they knew he was a married man playing at bachelorhood for an afternoon, her sister looked so wounded and disappointed that she quickly backtracked and said that yes, she thought he’d come, maybe not tonight but soon, and who knows, maybe it would be tonight after all.
But there was to be no tonight for them, they learned when their father came back from wherever he had been wandering and found the message waiting that he’d been hoping for, calling him to a meeting with his long-lost friends.
A dinner meeting, at a tavern closer to the harbor, which meant that he would be away into the evening, and they would not be permitted to traipse about the common room without his supervision. They would take their dinner in the room, and he’d given coin to the servants to make sure they stayed there, because he knew otherwise they’d be slipping down to wine and music as soon as he was off.
“Couldn’t we just come with you?” Hilwen asked him, willing to trade away the hope of seeing their fox-faced friend for any kind of evening entertainment. “We wouldn’t make any fuss, you could just put us at another bench …”
“You know I can’t do that, girl,” he said, and Rowenna had known their father would say no but she was still a bit surprised at how harshly he said it, as though there was some understanding she was breaking by even asking for the chance to come.
But maybe it was just that he was excited and nervous, in a way that couldn’t help make her nervous as well, all her fears resurfacing as Hilwen sulked in their shared bed and their da paced about, went downstairs and came back up, dressed himself, plastered at least a copper’s worth of water on his hair, and finally went out for good, telling them to be good girls and say a prayer to the angels for the success of all their plans.
Which Rowenna did, fervently, first when they blessed the food sent up from the kitchens and then again when darkness had settled, the candles waned, their father hadn’t yet returned, and they said their night prayers and tried to treat the hum and music from below them not as a distraction or temptation, but as a lullaby carrying them to sleep.
She didn’t know why she awoke when she did, cold even in her wool nightgown, briefly confused as always to awake in a strange place after sleeping for thirteen years in the same bed and room and house. No sounds of music or laughter floated upward now, the only noises were faint creaks and ghostly sighs. A little light came between the curtains, enough for her to look around and see her sister wrapped tightly in the blanket they were supposed to share. Enough for her to look to the cot and see it empty, her father still absent, though evening was long past and the city was blanketed by night.
As her mind tried to forge a reassuring explanation she became aware of a strong pressure on her bladder, and she got up and went across the corner where the chamber pot hunched, goblin-like, awaiting offerings. She hoisted the skirts of her nightgown and tried to tilt herself with some kind of aim above the target — only to have the stream freeze inside her, a single drop escaping as she clenched back up, at the sound of voices just outside their door.
For a long moment she balanced there, expecting and hoping to hear her father’s accent emerge from the muted conversation, and to hear his key, the inn’s key he carried off to supper with him, turning gently in the lock. But though there was something a bit familiar in one of the voices, and though something was definitely happening with the door, she did not hear her da’s accent and the noise around the latch was more of a probing sound — not a solid tumbling click but a delicate brush of metal against metal, not reassuring but frightening, not the confident noise of a returning father but the gentle machinations of a thief.
She had a vision of what she ought to do, and quickly, while the door was still locked – dive across the room to her sleeping sister, rouse her hastily, and then shove the bed against the door and scream, scream, scream for help until the rafters rang.
For an indeterminate instant she contemplated that possibility, frozen in her crouch over the pot.
And then — too late, too late — she did hear the click and tumble, the door opened fractionally, hinging inward toward the corner where she crouched, except now she was standing and plastering herself back against the wall, seeing candlelight spill toward the room’s far corner and her father’s empty bed.
Shapes bulked in the light, long shadows flailing.
“Last chance to change their fates.” It was a deep voice, rich in authority.
“I saw what I saw, m’lord.” It was the familiar voice she’d heard faintly through the wall. “What you pay me to see. The elder knows something, I can’t say what; the younger is all innocence.”
“On your conscience, then — which is also what I pay for, I suppose.”
The boards creaked, she shrank back further, her desperate mind made the link — the second voice was the fox face, the flirt.
“Only one,” hissed the deeper voice. The candlelight had fallen across the bed, a yellow glaze on Hilwen’s swaddling, and then it was flung suddenly to left and right, its arc swinging back just before it reached Rowenna’s corner, leaving her still hidden in the dark. “Only one, the the other girl is gone. Get downstairs now and sweep the common room, and then come back to me.”
A muttered m’lord and the fox-faced man was gone, leaving only the other shadow, bulky, moving now, carrying his pool of yellow deeper into the room, casting the light now one way, now another. His figure kept its back to Rowenna as it approached the bed and paused beside her sister’s shape. Then Hilwen stirred, her arm stretching and some kind of deep-sleep murmur slipping out, and as the figure took a step backward whatever part of Rowenna had kept her frozen earlier, when they might still have barred or blocked the door, suddenly gave way and she began to move.
Tiptoe, scuttle, spider-walk … with every movement she expected a terrible creaking from the floorboards, but somehow she was light enough, or the boards sturdy enough, that nothing audible escaped. A few desperate slow-motion movements and she had reached the edge of the still-open door, close enough that she could imagine slipping behind it. But no, that was madness, she had to get out, and so she stretched her left foot out again, a lift and fall, a balancing act, now swing the right foot, now past the door and in the doorway itself, the half-lit hallway just outside, escape …
“Nothing of him in this one, that’s certain.”
The voice froze her. She looked back and saw the candlelight falling full on her sister’s face, the bulky figure overlooking her, Hilwen still asleep with her hair like a brown net cast around her face.
Another urge to scream and wake her, wake up the whole inn, came over Rowenna then. But so did an image of the fox-faced man coming back up the stairs, the figure by the bed turning, herself caught between them, and then whatever happened to girls in the dark, whatever happened to country girls in the wicked city, whatever could have happened to her on the boat and didn’t … and she looked a last time at her sleeping, overshadowed sister and slipped through the door and out into the hall.
All was silence. A single taper lit the top of the stairs going down to the second floor, and then down again to the common room. Not that way. In the other direction the hallway ran on, following the streetfacing front of the building, and then turned left into shadow.
Was there a back stairway? There had to be. She ran lightly down the hall and turned the corner — into another hallway, this one vanishing into darkness, no candlelight to show the way. She followed the hall, groping at the walls, feeling her eyes adjust, seeing what might be a faint glow around the next turning, coming closer and closer, praying hysterically as she moved, and then turning again and gasping aloud when she saw the taper, the doorway, the staircase going down.
She took the taper, prying it from its protected sconce, the wax dripping hot on the flesh of her shaking hand. Down the stairs, then, quickly, to the next floor and then even faster down the final flight, which ended at a door, half-ajar, into a large room that wasn’t the common room or any room she’d seen before.
Peering in she decided it must be part of the kitchen, a stone space still lit by the embers in its arched fireplace, with stacks of dishes on the table and on a bench a hugely fat woman lying stone asleep, her bosoms heaving and falling, her snores prodigious, both her face and apron cherry-red.
On the floor beneath the bench lay a boy, likewise asleep in a blanket, a long thin gray-green shape where the woman was vast and red. They looked for all the world as if they had been stacked there, a pile of fruit and a single string bean, each on its own shelf.
And beyond the pair — a doorway, more shadows, steps leading down. To the street? To a back alley?
Wake the sleepers or brave the streets. Again she hesitated, but there was some kind of creak and clatter from the opposite end of the room, lost in night-murk but probably closer to the common room, and Rowenna was galvanized. Still clutching the taper she left her doorway and raced across the cool stone floor, her bare feet slapping loudly but now she didn’t care, she was running for her life, past the snoring kitchen-woman and the boy, past crates and barrels and a pair of sleeping cats, down the steps to a heavy door, hands at the bolt, the bolt giving way, the door swinging wide and the blank wall of the building behind the inn revealed to her candlelight, with just enough space between the buildings to be called an alleyway.
She looked back, saw no pursuit, and stepped out into the cool night air. She had no idea of where to go; her only thought was that she needed somewhere to hide herself till morning, when she would have to throw herself on somebody’s mercy — the innkeeper, the city watch, the legionnaires at the Castle gates, the priests at the nearest shrine or even the Temple.
First, though, she needed to get away from the inn, and thinking that she turned in what she thought was the direction of the Great Way, took a step and immediately hit something unexpected and fell over on top of it, clutching the candle in both hands and barely keeping it aloft and alight as she went over, sprawling on top of something hard but yielding, something like a body …
She sat up and lifted the candle. His face was still the same face, the familiar gray stubble over the weak chin, the nose with the divot where it had been broken in his legion days. The eyes were open, staring, as though he had just seen something unexpected in their pastures.
Only his neck was changed, opened as neatly as any animal he had had ever butchered, the dark spill of blood blending with the deep brown of his vest, cloaking the fine white shirt he’d bought himself in Bluehaven.
She did not scream, but only because she couldn’t get the air for it. Instead she gasped and gasped and gasped, sitting there athwart her father’s chest, the candle’s wax melting drop by drop into her hands.
There was a noise from the doorway, from the kitchens. Part of her wanted to stay there, to give up, to just wait for whatever came out to find her.
Another part of her wanted to live, wanted it more desperately than ever, and that part was stronger.
She ran.
The Great Way was all-but-deserted, torchlit here and there. Her feet hit the stones, pain in every running step, the candlelight bobbing wildly, the buildings like masks gaping at her on either side.
Her thoughts were flailing, helpless. Did the city watch have night patrols? Was the Temple open? There were signs she couldn’t read, lighted windows here and there but always above sealed and shuttered doors. The stones carried her downhill, always downhill, so that when she finally halted and looked back she could see the city rising starlit behind her, the shadows of its great buildings overlapping one another, blurring into the shadows of the mountains.
Maybe one of those shapes was the Temple dome, away up and to her right somehow — she must have passed whatever turning led to it in her pell-mell flight. But now she was somewhere that smelled like the harbor, where they had disembarked — a watery smell seasoned with smoke and dung and rotten eggs and fish.
Back up the way she had come she saw a smear of torchlight, heard distant voices. The watch, or her pursuers? Her own candle was dying, the flame’s heat closing with her clutching fingers. She would be in the dark soon. Was it better to choose the dark, to find a place to hide, to make her decisions when the light returned?
The voices were closer. She spun right, toward the smell of water, and left the Great Way for a street that soon twisted down and further down, the buildings close on either side, no lit windows or torches here. A rat burst across her path, but that was an enemy she knew, an old familiar. The reek of dung and piss was powerful; the stars above throbbed when she looked up.
At last the street flattened out, and there was hardened earth beneath her feet instead of stone. The last wax turned liquid in her hand and she dropped the stub of candle with a yelp; it flared against the dark and died away. In the starlight she could see the shapes of buildings encircling an open space — some kind of square, with some sort of central figure, a human shape but larger, which when she crept closer revealed its spread angelic wings. In the shadow of the statue she let herself drop and pressed her face, aquiver with suppressed sobs and almost-chattering teeth, against the cold stone of the plinth.
In a murmur she went through the litany, ending with Jophiel, trying to make her mind return to the forest by their farm, the little shrine, her mother’s hands and voice.
Oh most holy champion … overshadow us with your wings … save us from the day’s enemy, the terror of the night ….
There were whispers in the dark, shadows moving over shadows, a feeling of eyes upon her back. She wanted to live but there was nothing to be done: she had neither light to see nor energy to move. The stone was cold, the stars burned. She prayed, and shivered, and waited.
The whispering continued, ebbed, returned. There was light with it, torchlight, footsteps. A figure like the angel, larger than a human, a blaze of gold around its face.
She knew him, unless this too was a dream. The bald dome, the pockmarks, the weighing, penetrative gaze.
But when he bent his voice was soft, gentle, almost childlike.
“Here now,” he said. “Here now, little one. Let’s get you somewhere safe.”